Text-processing systems may often be required to process a high volume of textual information. For example, an Email Response Management System (ERMS) may need to process as many as 400,000 incoming customer email messages each day. These incoming email messages may relate to any number of different business scenarios. For example, certain customers may submit service order requests to their service provider via email. Other customers may submit complaints or assistance requests to certain providers via email. To effectively handle this high volume of incoming email, the ERMS must be capable of interpreting these messages in an intelligent fashion and then routing the messages to the appropriate personnel, if necessary. As such, text-processing systems must be capable of making intelligent decisions to determine how to best process textual information.
To make these types of decisions, text-processing systems typically utilize a set of rules. A rule-base engine can then implement these rules to trigger actions and make the appropriate decisions. Typically, a trained and skilled administrator will need to create and modify the rules used by the rule-based engine by writing programming code. In a complex text-processing system, there may be a large number of different rules to administer. As such, the administrator may need to spend a significant amount of time creating new rules for use in the text-processing system.
Certain systems allow highly trained and skilled administrators to create and use rule templates. Typically, these administrators create the templates using shell scripting or other programming languages. After the scripts are created, business users are then able to select from and use a predetermined set of these rule templates via a graphical user interface (GUI). The users can then insert values into various fields of these templates to define the specific rules that are to be used by the text-processing system.